Lucio's Confession

For Antonio Ponce de Leão

… thus were we obscurely two, both of unsure as to whether the other was not in fact himself, whether that uncertain other event existed.

Fernando Pessoa

In the Forest of Alienation

THE TRANSLATOR

Margaret Jull Costa has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, amongst them Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Javier Marías, and Bernardo Atxaga.

Her work has brought her various prizes, the most recent being the 2008 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Prize and the 2008 Oxford Weidenfeld Award for her translation of Eça de Queiroz’s masterpiece The Maias.

Portuguese Literature from Dedalus

Dedalus, as part of its Europe 1992–2012 programme, with the assistance of The Portuguese Book Institute, The Camões Institute in London and The Gulbenkian Foundation, has embarked on a series of new translations by Margaret Jull Costa of some of the major classics of Portuguese Literature.

Titles so far published:

The City and the Mountains – Eça de Queiroz

Cousin Bazilio – Eça de Queiroz

The Crime of Father Amaro – Eça de Queiroz

The Maias – Eça de Queiroz

The Mandarin (and other stories) – Eça de Queiroz

The Relic – Eça de Queiroz

The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers – Eça de Queiroz

Lucio’s Confession – Mario de Sá-Carneiro

The Great Shadow (and other stories) – Mario de Sá-Carneiro

The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy –

Editors: Eugenio Lisboa and Helder Macedo

Forthcoming titles include:

Alves & Co (and other stories) – Eça de Queiroz

The Illustrious House of Ramires – Eça de Queiroz

Contents

Title

Dedication

Epigraph

The Translator

Portuguese Literature from Dedalus

Foreword

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

Copyright

Foreword

The poet and fiction writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro was born in Lisbon in 1890 and committed suicide in Paris in 1916, when he was barely 26 years old. Although he did not leave a particularly large body of work, he was one of the most influential writers of what, in Portugal, is termed Primeiro Modernismo, its other major exponents being Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) and Almada Negreiros (1893–1970). Mário de Sá-Carneiro has tended to be relegated to the background, very much in the shadow of Fernando Pessoa, but José Régio, the best-known representative of the literary movement that succeeded Primeiro Modernismo, had no hesitation in describing him – with some justification – as ‘both the acknowledged forerunner and the greatest exponent of so-called Portuguese modernism’. Elsewhere, proving that his description of the author of A confissão de Lúcio (Lúcio’s Confession) was not the product of some temporary aberration, Régio writes of Sá-Carneiro that he is ‘one of our most remarkable poets’ and ‘the greatest interpreter of a particular contemporary sensibility’. Given that José Régio is generally considered to be one of Portugal’s most penetrating and most cautious critics, his words have a certain weight.

Mário de Sá-Carneiro was, at once, one of the most strikingly innovative literary figures of his day and, intellectually, a typical child of the times: the years immediately preceding and including the First World War, with all the horrors that implies.

The future author of Indícios de Ouro (Traces of Gold) and Céu em fogo (The Sky Ablaze) was the rebellious son of an upper middle-class Lisbon family; he was also an erratic student, endowed with a bizarre and intense imagination. He tried studying law for a year at Coimbra University, then left for Paris where he enrolled in the same course, although without ever actually attending any lectures.

Sá-Carneiro was linked by ties of friendship and respect to Fernando Pessoa and the futurist group that grew up around the magazine Orpheu and, for a very brief period, he, like all his friends, found himself playing a part for which he had little natural inclination, that of agent provocateur. Sá-Carneiro was too honest, too personal to be involved for any length of time in rowdy burlesques, however well-intentioned, or to adhere to the conventions of any literary schools of thought, even those with which he was for some time associated: decadent symbolism, paùlismo (one of Fernando Pessoa’s inventions), or noisy, superficial futurism … As Régio more than once remarked: ‘in Mário de Sá-Carneiro the shaking up of worn-out formulae and antiquated means of expression … is a natural consequence of his anomalous poetic psyche’. Sá-Carneiro’s way of living out his singular personality had an infectious intensity that transmitted itself to his readers. Like one of the characters in Lúcio’s Confession he obliges his readers to be as intense as he is. And it is that very intensity which lends his strange confession its undeniable authenticity.

Sá-Carneiro shares another defect with certain of his characters, that of excess. Régio commented that for Sá-Carneiro: ‘Shapes are sketchy outlines, lights mere glimmerings, memories vague recollections and images mirages – except when, paradoxically, all those things take on, in his eyes, an unbearable, indeed excessive, intensity.’ That excess can be so overwhelming as to render us incapable of absorbing it. For that very reason, the poet writes elsewhere: ‘I am dying of starvation, of excess’: that is, having so much at my disposal, I am dying deprived of everything – excess paralyses and, eventually, kills.

This book, dated 1913, is a highly original work, closely connected to the profound and intense ‘I’ of Sá-Carneiro the poet. It is also a dated book, full of aesthetic mannerisms typical of the time. Dated or not, however, only a mischievously inattentive reader could fail to find in this remarkable work many of the perennial obsessions that pervade all the author’s poetry and fiction: the feeling of abnormality, the mystery of madness, the paroxysmic experience of the senses, love, death and decadence. As Régio says: in Lúcio’s Confession, as in Sá-Carneiro’s other works of fiction, a story drenched in anomaly sometimes demands a deliberately academic prose, as a sort of antidote to all that anomalousness. Like Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro had a horror of madness and abnormality in general, the reason, perhaps, why the whole of his work was a concerted effort to exorcise those demons.

Whatever the truth of that, Lúcio’s Confession, with its irresistible and unbearably intense mixture of innovation and convention, of aberrance and beauty, of death and love, of madness and lucidity, will stand as one of the most interesting and revealing documents left by the argonauts of that great Portuguese adventure, Primeiro Modernismo.

Eugénio Lisboa

After spending ten years in prison for a crime I did not commit but against which I offered no defence, numb now to life and to dreams, with nothing more to hope for and no desires, I have finally come to make my confession, that is, to prove my innocence.

You may not believe me, indeed I am sure you will not. But that is of little consequence. I have absolutely no interest now in telling the world that I did not murder Ricardo de Loureiro. I have no family; I have no need of vindication. Besides, the simple truth is that there can be no vindication for someone who has spent the last ten years in prison.

And to those who ask, having read what I have written: ‘But why did you not speak out at the time? Why did you not prove your innocence at the trial?’ to them I will reply: My defence was untenable. No one would have believed me. And what point was there in being taken for a liar or a madman? I should explain too that I was left so shattered by the events in which I found myself caught up, that the prospect of prison seemed to me almost a pleasant one. It meant oblivion, tranquillity, sleep. It simply provided an ending, a conclusion to my devastated life. All I wanted then was for the trial to be over and for my sentence to begin.

For the rest, the trial passed swiftly. Well, it seemed like an open-and-shut case. I neither denied anything nor confessed. But silence gives consent. Besides, everyone felt a certain sympathy for me.

The crime was, as the newspapers of the time no doubt put it, a ‘crime of passion’, a case of Cherchez la femme. What’s more the victim was a poet, an artist. The woman involved had made herself a still more romantic figure by vanishing. I was, in short, a hero, a hero with a hint of mystery about me, which only added to my glamour. For all these reasons, not to mention the splendid speech made by the defence, the jury concluded that there were extenuating circumstances and my sentence was therefore a short one.

Ah, how short a time it was – especially for me. Those ten years flew by as if they had been ten months. For time means nothing to someone who has felt his whole life condensed into a single moment. When you have endured the worst suffering, nothing can ever make you suffer again. When you have known the most intense of feelings, nothing can ever move you again. The fact is that very few people have experienced such a culminating moment. Those who have either do as I did and join the ranks of the living dead or else become one of the disenchanted who all too often end by taking their own lives.

I cannot honestly say that the greater happiness is not to experience such a moment. Those who do not may at least enjoy peace of mind. But the truth is that everyone hopes for such a moment of enlightenment. Therefore, no one is happy, which is why, despite everything, I am proud to have done so.

But enough of these speculations. I am not writing a novel. I simply wish to provide a clear exposition of the facts. And it